CHRIS POWELL: Fixing 'Lincoln' and illegal immigration

Congratulations to U.S. Rep. Joseph D. Courtney, D-2nd District, for catching the defamatory error in Steven Spielberg's otherwise wonderful new movie "Lincoln." The movie has two of three members of Connecticut's delegation in the House of Representatives voting in January 1865 against the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, the amendment that abolished slavery.

Courtney liked the movie but the disgrace to Connecticut stunned him. "How," he wrote to Spielberg the other day, "could congressmen from Connecticut -- a state that supported President Lincoln and lost thousands of her sons fighting against slavery on the Union side of the Civil War -- have been on the wrong side of history?"

Checking the Congressional Record for January 1865, Courtney found and told Spielberg that Connecticut was not on the wrong side -- found that all four members of the House from Connecticut actually voted for the amendment. So Courtney has asked Spielberg to correct the error when the movie is distributed on videodisc.

But Spielberg can't be faulted too much; the movie's mistakes and embellishments are small compared to the interest "Lincoln" is likely to generate in American history and government, which long have been neglected by public education.

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Besides, Connecticut's constitutional history isn't all heroism. Footnotes in the Connecticut State Register and Manual record that while the state needed only a few months to ratify the 13th Amendment, Connecticut neglected to ratify the Bill of Rights for 148 years, from 1791 to until April 1939, when fascist dictators in Europe were threatening the world.

As the country considers addressing illegal immigration again, it might look to Lincoln as well.

The outlines of the solution lately suggested by some Republican and Democratic members of Congress long have been on the table. Indeed, they are only the outlines of what was supposed to be the solution with the Simpson-Mazzoli Act in 1986 -- rigorous enforcement in exchange for amnesty. About 3 million illegals were amnestied then but there was no enforcement and now illegals are estimated to total 11 million, including innocent young people who know no other country and desperately want to be Americans. Who has the heart to deport them?

But to achieve consensus on the issue, this time enforcement must precede amnesty and show results.

Fortunately enforcement wouldn't be difficult. It would be directed mainly against unscrupulous employers -- a national system of quickly checking the eligibility of potential employees and rigorous prosecution of those who hire illegals.

The country can always use immigrants who can show that they would make good citizens -- that they have learned English and want to assimilate and commit themselves to democratic and secular society, not just send their earnings out of the country or claim that religious law exempts them from civil law. When control of immigration is lost, as it has been lost in Europe, control of the culture is lost. Europe is now Eurabia.

But immigrants ready to commit to a democratic and secular society would be better citizens than many of the native-born.

This is the universality of the United States that Lincoln perceived in the Declaration of Independence. Many Americans in his time were new ones, Lincoln noted, and could not trace their ancestry to the men who fought the Revolution. "But," he added, "when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration -- and so they are."

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.